“I beg pardon?” He was smiling, but the smile felt cold and false on his mouth. There was a heaviness in his belly, as if the punch and the soup and the single beef-strip he had eaten for politeness’ sake had all lumped together in his stomach. Do you serve? he’d asked her, meaning did she serve at table. Mayhap she did serve, but likely she did it in a room rather more private than this. Suddenly he wanted to hear no more; had not the slightest interest in the meaning of the word the Mayor’s sister had used.

Another burst of laughter rocked the top of the table. Susan laughed with her head back, her cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling. One strap of her dress had slipped down her arm, disclosing the tender hollow of her shoulder. As he watched, his heart full of fear and longing, she brushed it absently back into place with the palm of her hand.

“It means ‘quiet little woman,’” Renfrew said, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s an old term, not used much these days—”

“Stop it, Rennie,” said Coral Thorin. Then, to Roland: “He’s just an old cowboy, and can’t quit shovelling horseshit even when he’s away from his beloved nags. Sheevin means side-wife. In the time of my great-grandmother, it meant whore... but one of a certain kind.” She looked with a pale eye at Susan, who was now sipping ale, then turned back to Roland. There was a species of baleful amusement in her gaze, an expression that Roland liked little. “The kind of whore you had to pay for in coin, the kind too fine for the trade of simple folk.”

“She’s his gilly?” Roland asked through lips which felt as if they had been iced.

“Aye,” Coral said. “Not consummated, not until the Reap—and none too happy about that is my brother, I’ll warrant—but bought and paid for just as in the old days. So she is.” Coral paused, then said, “Her father would die of shame if he could see her.” She spoke with a kind of melancholy satisfaction.

“I hardly think we should judge the Mayor too harshly,” Renfrew said in an embarrassed, pontificating voice.

Coral ignored him. She studied the line of Susan’s jaw, the soft swell of her bosom above the silken edge of her bodice, the fall of her hair. The thin humor was gone from Coral Thorin’s face. In it now was a somehow chilling species of contempt.

In spite of himself, Roland found himself imagining the Mayor’s knuckle-bunchy hands pushing down the straps of Susan’s dress, crawling over her naked shoulders, plunging like gray crabs into the cave beneath her hair. He looked away, toward the table’s lower end, and what he saw there was no better. It was Olive Thorin that his eye found—Olive, who had been relegated to the foot of the table, Olive, looking up at the laughing folk who sat at its head. Looking up at her husband, who had replaced her with a beautiful young girl, and gifted that girl with a pendant which made her own firedim earrings look dowdy by comparison. There was none of Coral’s hatred and angry contempt on her face. Looking at her might have been easier if that were so. She only gazed at her husband with eyes that were humble, hopeful, and unhappy. Now Roland understood why he had thought her sad. She had every reason to be sad.